Memorial Weekend

The Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis) is a perennial that I gave to Charmaine many years ago.
I thought it would be a great symbol for Memorial Weekend, too.

In Flanders Fields
John McCrae, 1915.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Green Thursday: Don't let your Ash get bored

Wisconsin is on the verge of being invaded by the Emeral Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis.)

This alien invader is from northern China and Korea. It isn’t a major pest of ash trees in its native range, but it sure is trouble in the United States.

Before 2002, the emerald ash borer was never found outside of Asia, but in 2002, it was identified in southeast Michigan. Researchers think it arrived in Detroit several years earlier, probably as a stow-away in wooden packing materials aboard a ship. The original infestation has grown, largely because of people moving infested firewood. On its own, the emerald ash borer only flies about 1/2 a mile in a year, but tucked away in a piece of ash firewood, it can move hundreds of miles in a single day in the trunk or truck bed of an unsuspecting camper.

The emerald ash borer has now hitchhiked its way to much of lower Michigan and to the states of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Maryland and Ontario, Canada.

So what’s the big deal? All North American ash species are at risk of infestation. Usually more than one insect infests a tree. Once these invaders get into a tree, the tree always dies. There are some ash trees that are not at risk, such as the mountain ash, but that’s because they are not true ash trees. In Wisconsin, there are approximately 700 million ash trees in our forests, and about as many in our towns and cities. It’s the second most common tree in urban areas, after the Norway maple. So, you can imagine what these insects could do to Wisconsin’s ash trees!

Governor Doyle has proclaimed this Emerald Ash Borer awareness week. He tells us "The two most important things that people can do are to stop transporting firewood long distances, and to become better educated about the beetle."

Here's a couple of links to do just that:

Green Menace-Emerald Ash Borer

Official Wisconsin info site

Every Green Thursday we post information vital to the survival of the planet.

Walls of Water and other things

This is the second season that we've employed the "Wall O' Water" tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) towers in the LipsYard garden. It's two pieces of plastic, seamed together to form columns that you fill with water for support and insulation.

They provide protection for the young plants from the cool of the night, and heat things up during the day for faster growth. Find out more HERE.

The "Wall O' Water" has similarities to the "Wall O' Neocons" surrounding President George W. Bush. The same group of guys that got us into Iraq, are now pushing an incursion into Iran before the President's term is up (see the countdown clock to the left for just exactly how long that is.)

A top official in Jerusalem claims that a senior member in the entourage of President Bush, who visited Israel last week, had said in a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action against Iran was called for.

Only the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was preventing the administration from deciding to launch such an attack on the Islamic Republic.

Be strong Bob and Condi!

Ooo that smell

Coming around the corner to the back LipsYard a heavenly scent fills the air. It's the Purpleleaf Sand Cherry (Prunus cistena.) Its deep foliage collor and lighter blossoms are offset nicely by the Flowering Crab (Malus,) but it's the scent that makes this one of our favorites.

It smells like Grape Nehi soda! You know, the kind Radar downed at Rosie's in M*A*S*H. Charmaine and I find any excuse we can to go out the back door and take a big whiff.

There's also a smell around the John McCain campaign, and unlike Grape Nehi, it stinks! It's the smell of lobbyists. Just days after it issued new rules to address conflicts of interest, the McCain campaign was furiously sifting through the business records of aides and advisers. The new rules were prompted by disclosures that led to the abrupt departure from the campaign of a number of aides who worked as lobbyists, including some with ties to foreign governments.

McCain has long been defined by his calls for reducing the influence of special interests in Washington, but as he heads toward November, he has increasingly confronted criticism that his campaign staff is stocked with people who have made their living as lobbyists or in similar jobs, leaving his credentials as a reformer open to attack.

New pics of an old friend

It's been growing away for 8 years along the East lotline of the LipsYard, and we've never featured the Viburnum (Viburnum.)

Our's has just burst out in white and yellow blooms, in its place between the Arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis) and Ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius.) Viburnums have long been one of the most popular flowering landscape shrubs. There are over 150 species, and you can find a variety to suit any garden need: wet or dry, sun or shade, natural or formal, shrub or tree, native or exotic, Zones 2-9. Bloom times span early spring through June and are followed by attractive fruit and outstanding fall foliage.

Another old friend has come up in the news over the weekend; Senator Ted Kennedy suffered a seizure at his Cape Cod compound, and is now at Mass. General Hospital. We wish this stalwart legislator and champion of the people a speedy recovery.

Green Thursday: Survey Says...

Americans are ranked last when it comes to being environmentally friendly. U.S. consumers are at the bottom of the National Geographic Society's new “Greendex” survey. No surprise with that one, heck, we can't even get half the country to agree that there even is a human component to climate change.

One-thousand consumers in each of 14 nations were asked about their homes, energy use, transportation, food and buying habits. The United States is last in transportation, housing and purchases of goods and is near the bottom on food.

Brazil and India are tied at the top of the survey. Brazilians live in small homes and most have no heat or air conditioning. Homes in India are similar to those in Brazil.

National Geographic vice president Terry Garcia says this first annual “Greendex” will serve as a baseline for future surveys, allowing observers to see the progress people are making "to conserve, minimize waste and protect natural resources for the future." As the bumper sticker says, think globally, act locally.

Every Green Thursday we post information vital to the planet.

Crabs in bloom

Tis the season for flowering trees, and this week belongs to the Crabapples (Malus.)

The one in the back LipsYard buds out in bright fusia, then pops into a snow white blossom.

In the front LipsYard, the more mature Crabapple has a pinkish tint to the Blossom.

They are truly spectacular, and the entire neighborhood is alive with blossoms. A road trip to Whitnall Park in Hales Corners, WI to see all their flowering crabs is worth the $4 a gallon gas we've seen blossoming all over town.

Come Fly With Me as postage soars

A new stamp honoring Frank Sinatra goes on sale today. First-day-of-sale ceremonies for the 42-cent stamp will be held Tuesday at three locations familiar to the singer and actor.

The first ceremony for the "Chairman of the Board" was hosted by the post office's own chairman of the board of governors. Joining him at the ceremony at Gotham Hall in New York was be Frank's daughter Nancy and son, Frank Sinatra Jr.

Two other ceremonies will be held at 3 this afternoon. In Las Vegas, Tina Sinatra will join Postal Service governor James Bilbray in dedicating the stamp at the Bellagio fountain`s main alcove on Las Vegas Boulevard. And Frank Sinatra Jr. will join Jersey lawmaker Albio Sires in a ceremony in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra`s hometown.

"42 cents?" you ask. The price of a first-class stamp went up a penny to yesterday. Other postal rates increased, too. Get used to it. A new law, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, means that the U.S. Postal Service will adjust prices for mailing services every May. The act was signed into law December 2006 by President Bush, who has posed for a stamp of his own.

Euphorbia euphoria

Serving as bookends to the LipsYard perennial garden is a healthy blobs of Cushion Spurge (Euphorbia polychroma.) This one's on the left by the compost bin,

and this one's on the right by the herbs. These brightly colored plants bloom for weeks. To get technical, the flowers are actually bracts or modified leaves, which is why they last so long. It's just like the Poinsettia, which is in the same family.

Our Euphorbia euphoria is similiar to the Bush administration's disaster dementia; the worse things get, the happier 'W' becomes. Heck, he's even doing a little soft shoe dancing before press conferences. Maureen Dowd summed it up this way,

"Maybe the president is just putting on a good face to keep up American morale, the way Herbert Hoover did after the crash of '29, when he continued to dress in a tuxedo for dinner.

Or maybe the old Andover cheerleader really believes his own cheers, and that prosperity will turn up any time now, just like the W.M.D. in Iraq.

Or perhaps it's a Freudian trip. Now that he's mucked up the world and the country, he can finally stop rebelling against his dad and relax in the certainty that the Bush name will forever be associated with crash-and-burn presidencies."

Click HERE to bust a move on the dance floor with President Bush

Happy Mother's Day!

Here's a floral salute to Mom.


The Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora)



The Serviceberry (Amelanchier arborea)



The Flowering Almond (Prunus triloba)

The earliest tributes to mothers date back to the annual spring festival the Greeks dedicated to Rhea, the mother of many deities, and to the offerings ancient Romans made to their Great Mother of Gods, Cybele. Christians celebrated this festival on the fourth Sunday in Lent in honor of Mary, mother of Christ. In England this holiday was expanded to include all mothers and was called Mothering Sunday.

In the United States, Mother's Day started nearly 150 years ago, when Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker, organized a day to raise awareness of poor health conditions in her community, a cause she believed would be best advocated by mothers. She called it "Mother's Work Day."

Fifteen years later, Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet, pacifist, suffragist, and author of the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," organized a day encouraging mothers to rally for peace, since she believed they bore the loss of human life more harshly than anyone else.

In 1905 when Anna Jarvis died, her daughter, also named Anna, began a campaign to memorialize the life work of her mother. Legend has it that young Anna remembered a Sunday school lesson that her mother gave in which she said, "I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mother's day. There are many days for men, but none for mothers."

Anna began to lobby prominent businessmen like John Wannamaker, and politicians including Presidents Taft and Roosevelt to support her campaign to create a special day to honor mothers. At one of the first services organized to celebrate Anna's mother in 1908, at her church in West Virginia, Anna handed out her mother's favorite flower, the white carnation. Five years later, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution calling for officials of the federal government to wear white carnations on Mother's Day. In 1914 Anna's hard work paid off when Woodrow Wilson signed a bill recognizing Mother's Day as a national holiday.

At first, people observed Mother's Day by attending church, writing letters to their mothers, and eventually, by sending cards, presents, and flowers. With the increasing gift-giving activity associated with Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis became enraged. She believed that the day's sentiment was being sacrificed at the expense of greed and profit. In 1923 she filed a lawsuit to stop a Mother's Day festival, and was even arrested for disturbing the peace at a convention selling carnations for a war mother's group. Before her death in 1948, Jarvis is said to have confessed that she regretted ever starting the mother's day tradition.

Despite Jarvis's misgivings, Mother's Day has flourished in the United States. In fact, the second Sunday of May has become the most popular day of the year to dine out, and telephone lines record their highest traffic, as sons and daughters everywhere take advantage of this day to honor and to express appreciation of their mothers.

Happy Mother's Day

Green Thursday: A Princely Effort

Prince Charles, yes, that Prince Charles, the one with the goofy ears who used to be married to Princess Diana, is a huge green guy! His latest effort is a new eco-town, named Sherford, created by his highness. It's just been given the green light to start construction.

This brand new town for 12,000 people, in South Devon, will be Britain’s greenest settlement. The rolling countryside community will be home to 5,500 homes. Cars will be banned from some parts and 390ft wind turbines will loom over a 400-acre car park on the outskirts. Half the power needs for the new town will come from renewable sources, with all homes sporting solar panels. Additionally, most of the materials for construction will be sourced from a 50-mile radius! The business district, providing jobs for about 7,000 people, will be covered in either green roofs or a thin layer of rubble to attract insects and birds. Everything about the town will be organized to encourage walking; not to mention all waste including water and sewage will be recycled to cut CO2 emissions. All of this, and style, too! Charles intends to give it a traditional English charm, modeled on the Wiltshire market town of Marlborough.

Closer to home, a new residential development in Onalaska (near LaCrosse,) will become Wisconsin's first Energy Star certified neighborhood.

The single family homes of Savannah Village start at $330k, and are at least 25% more efficient than normal homes. They'll have inside and outside wall insulation to help keep heat in. Also, none of the houses will have vinyl siding because of it's huge manufacturing carbon footprint. The neighborhood also features specially designed roads for better storm water drainage.

Every Green Thursday we post information vital to the survival of our planet.

We've got the blues

The Virginia Bluebells ( Mertensia virginica) are in bloom in the LipsYard garden. They're one of the first to give color to the backyard. They also attract butterflies.

The flowers can be pollinated by bumblebees, but due to their funnel shape, bumblebees must hover, making them a rare pollinator. Butterflies are the most common pollinators, because they can easily perch on the edges and still enjoy the nectar.

We're not the only one with the blues. FBI agents on Tuesday raided the Office of Special Counsel and closed down its e-mail system in what appears to be a probe into political misuse of the agency. The agents seized computers and documents belonging to the head of the agency, Scott Bloch, and his staff. Bloch was nominated by President Bush in 2003.

The Office of Special Counsel, created after the Watergate political scandal of the 1970s, is an independent agency is charged with protecting federal employees, and looking into whether whistleblower complaints deserve investigations. It also enforces a law forbidding government workers from engaging in partisan politics.

The Feds are investigating claims that Bloch abused his authority to investigate cases, retaliated against employees, and dismissed whistleblower cases with little examination.

Bloch has long been accused of rolling back protections for federal workers who face sexual-orientation discrimination; installing staffers in key posts who share his religious-conservative worldview; wielding his prosecutorial power for partisan purposes; and turning his agency into a "black hole" for whistleblower disclosures and complaints of reprisal.

Fencing in the Garden

Planting in the LipsYard garden is under way, so it's time to fence out all the critters who want a piece of the fresh leafy green action. We keep the chicken wire rolled up in the garage. First job is to lay out the stakes and pound them in the ground.

I've dug a trench with a hoe around the perimiter, then unrolled the fence in it. After attaching the fence to the posts, Charmaine fills in the trench to make a "bunny-proof" barrier.

Take that you "waskally wabbits!"

The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear.

Technical problems discovered in a 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson prompted the change in plans, Department of Homeland Security officials and congressional auditors told a House subcommittee. This is believed to be a "classified" photo of illegal aliens attempting to cross the virtual fence.

This is a major setback for what President Bush in May 2006 called "the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history." The virtual fence was to be a key component of his proposed overhaul of U.S. immigration policies, which died last year in the Senate. Call it another "Mission Accomplished" moment.

Boeing, the contractor that developed the flawed fence, was paid $85 million for their trouble, and sent on their way.

An old friend returns

Our bright orange friend, the Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula,) is back in the LipsYard. Not named for the city, the Baltimore Oriole gets its moniker from the fact that the male's colors resemble those on the coat-of-arms of Lord Baltimore. It is also the state bird of Maryland.

They don't stay around for long, as they're just passing through on their way north to their breeding grounds. They do like to eat from oranges we cut in half and put out by the other bird feeders. You can also get special Oriole feeders, that look like oversized hummingbird feeders.

Also back this spring, are high prices at the pump. When oil prices skyrocket, inevitably Republicans will talk about drilling in Alaska and blame Democrats for blocking proposals that would open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for petroleum exploration.

President Bush didn't disappoint drilling advocates at a press conference last week, calling again for drilling ANWR.

Few people have bothered asking exactly how much oil might be produced if the Arctic refuge is opened up. The answer: not much in the scheme of things _ around 1 million barrels per day. And the Alaska oil wouldn't hit the market for another 10 years.

According to a report from the Department of Energy, at its peak capacity in 2025, ANWR would produce 1 million barrels of oil a day, only reducing world oil prices around 30 cents to 50 cents a barrel. Heck for that kind of savings, you might as well cut the federal gas tax for a summer.

A couple of firsts

One of the first flowers to bloom in spring is the perennial Pasque Flower (Pulsatilla.) You might have heard it called prairie crocus, wind flower, Easter Flower or meadow anemone. The pasque flower is the official state flower of South Dakota, but we won't hold that against it.

Pasque refers to Easter (Passover) as the flower blooms around that time (except when Easter is really, really early like this year.)

Pasque flower is highly toxic, and produces cardiogenic toxins and oxytoxins which slow the heart in humans, and has been used as a medicine by Native Americans for centuries.

Also making its first appearance of 2008 in the LipsYard, the Dandelion (Taraxacum.) We don't like this lovely yellow pest very much, and do everything we can to keep it under control.

No president has ever had a 71% dissaproval rating with the American public, until now. George W. Bush has just become the first. The latest CNN poll shows that the man who brought us the Iraq war and the current state of the economy with his love for big business, is the most unpopular president in history. Who came closest to W`s low ratings? Richard Nixon right before he resigned in 1974!

Green Thursday: May(day) at the EPA

A congressional watchdog agency has found that White House officials repeatedly intervened in the government's scientific process for assessing the health risks of toxic chemicals.

The Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday that the White House's budget office, the Pentagon and other agencies had delayed or blocked efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to list chemicals as carcinogens by requesting more research or more time to review the risks.

A top EPA official, who was grilled at a Congressional committee hearing Tuesday, responded that it was helpful to have more input from the White House and other agencies. Helpful for protecting big business!

Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who is chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, called the findings scandalous.

Scandal, in the Bush administration?

If EPA does not speed up its assessments of toxic chemicals, she warned that Congress might step in and start banning substances that threaten the public health.

GAO officials also faulted the administration for setting new rules that keep secret any involvement by the White House or a federal agency in a decision about the risks of a chemical. Secrets, in the Bush administration?

Since President Bush took office in 2001, the White House has sought to take more control of a process that has long been led by EPA scientists. The Office of Management and Budget, the Defense Department, the Energy Department and even NASA have taken steps to influence risk assessments that could affect those agencies or hurt U.S. industries.

Case in point: The EPA started a risk assessment of naphthalene, a chemical used in jet fuel, in 2002, and agency scientists have been moving toward listing it as a likely human carcinogen. But many military sites are contaminated with naphthalene, which could lead to major cleanup costs for the Pentagon. So, White House budget officials slowed the process, repeatedly requesting more analysis. Six years later, the risk assessment is back at the drafting stage.

Risk assessments have slowed to a crawl because of the prolonged inter-agency review. Out of 32 draft risk assessments prepared by the EPA over the last two years, only four were approved.

Public health advocates warn that the results are years-long delays in regulating harmful chemicals that scientists have linked to rising cancer rates in some groups.

Thank you President George W. Bush.

Every Green Thursday we post information vital to the health of the planet.